You may want to overlook the expletives in leftist Jeb Lund’s article in the leftist Guardian arguing that Democrats lost in 2014 because they didn’t run on a left-wing platform.
The article was free — refreshingly, perhaps, in its author’s mind but self-refutingly to reality-based readers — of any evidence from polling or otherwise that leftist policies would have helped Democrats. Some of his points are valid: Alison Lundergran Grimes was foolish to refuse to say she voted for President Obama, as any wide-awake voter would assume she had; the withdrawal of the Democratic candidate in Kansas (ratified despite the letter of the law by liberal-dominated judges) was a confession of weakness; and it’s a bad campaign tactic to depend on the other parties’ candidates to make boneheaded statements as Todd Akin did in 2010, because sometimes they don’t.
He laments that few or no Democrats in seriously contested races campaigned as champions of Obamacare. Has Lund looked at the polls? Any campaign consultant who advised doing so would be expelled from the campaign’s real and virtual strategy meetings and would have a hard time finding clients in future election cycles.
That said, Lund seems not to have looked at the exit polls. He laments that in Georgia, which he describes as only 52 percent white, Democrat Michelle Nunn didn’t take leftist votes which he believes would have produced overwhelming Democratic support. But whites made up 64 percent of the electorate and voted 74 to 23 percent for Republican David Perdue. Blacks accounted for 29 percent of the electorate — just about the same as their percentage of the total population — and voted 92 to 7 percent for Nunn. Latinos accounted for just 4 percent, understandable since many Georgia Latinos are recently arrived and are not citizens; and, more important, they voted for Nunn by only a 57 to 42 percent margin. That amounts to only a 0.6 percent majority for Democrats as a percentage of the total electorate. And Jeb Lund provides no reason whatever to believe that Georgia Latinos agree with leftist public policies except that they are “non-white.” If he had looked down the page to the ideology question he would find that only 17 percent of Georgia voters identify themselves as liberal — far from the 33 percent who are either black or Latino.
Lawyers have a saying that when the facts are against you, you argue the law; when the law is against you, you argue the facts; when the facts and the law are both against you, you pound the table.
Jeb Lund and, undoubtedly, many Guardian readers are pounding the table. Only a small minority of Americans favor the leftist policies they like, and most American voters, this year at least, don’t back the policies of the Democrats.
The playwright Bertolt Brecht said that his chosen East German Communist regime needed to elect a new people. Jeb Lund and his kind would like to elect a different American people. Maybe it’s time for them to take a vacation.
